CSIR suggests coronavirus surveillance for Parliament

Moots setting up of sewage and air surveillance system

Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has mooted setting up sewage and air surveillance system in the Indian Parliament to find the prevalence of COVID-19 on Tuesday. Director General Shekhar C. Mande made a presentation to this effect to Vice-President and Chairman of Rajya Sabha M. Venkaiah Naidu in the presence of Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) Director Rakesh Mishra, IICT Director S. Chandrasekhar, senior scientist Venkata Mohan and Atya Kapley of National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (Nagpur). Dr. Mande informed the Vice-President that sewage surveillance provides qualitative as well as quantitative estimate of the number of people infected in a population and could be used to understand the progression of COVID-19 even when mass scale tests for individuals are not possible. It is a measure to comprehensively monitor the prevalence of the disease in communities in real time. Elaborating on the relevance of sewage surveillance, Dr. Mande pointed out that COVID-19 patients shed SAR-CoV- 2 in stools.